Fear and loathing in Cairo

Through the practices of prayer, mutual regard, communal celebration, patriotism and non-violence, the Egyptian protesters have opened up an entirely new political space
Credit: Dylan Martinez (Reuters)

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This is perhaps the clearest demonstration that it is not democracy - as a specific mode of representative governance, along with the civic and political virtues that sustain democratic society - that the West lauds and seeks to promulgate, but rather liberal democracy as a particular late-twentieth century contrivance.

Liberal democracy is, at bottom, the designation for an individuated politics under the conditions of what Philip Bobbitt has rightly termed "the market-state," which seeks legitimation "through its promise to maximise its citizens' opportunities."

Which means that, under the conditions of the market-state, the object of Western politics has shifted from the protection and conservation of civil society - which itself represents a kind of moral substance, a set of virtues, habits and values that constitute our common life - to the service of individual aspirations.

In other words, liberal democracy today stands for nothing other than the impenitent rejection of the cardinal virtues of Western democracy itself. As Herve Juvin puts it:

"Politics is becoming the art of serving particular interests, and in the first place ensuring the satisfaction of bodies. The privatization of politics is proceeding from that, with some unforeseen consequences: what meaning for example can the words 'equality', 'liberty', 'solidarity' still have in societies dedicated to the service of individual aspirations? Should we not conclude that 'health, safety, pleasure' has acquired the sort of meaning that 'liberty, equality, fraternity' has lost?"

It is this transposition of the very terms of democracy from the virtuous principles of equality-liberty-solidarity (the tenets of universalism) to that of health-safety-pleasure (a brazenly domestic politics practiced abroad) that allows for two of the more perfidious features of the exercise of liberal democracy.

The first is the reduction of anything like robust public debate concerning what constitutes the common good or the nature of civic virtue - or "citizenship," for that matter - to the banality of "cultural diversity" as such. Multiculturalism in the West operates under the rubric of the fundamental contemporary right not to be irritated by difference.

And so, in place of the common struggle for what is good and noble and leads to human flourishing, different cultural expressions are required, in order to exist side-by-side, to empty themselves of their proper substance in favour of the torpid flatness of mere diversity.

Francis Fukuyama has nicely described such cultural diversity as "a kind of ornament to liberal pluralism that would provide ethnic restaurants, colorful dress, and traces of distinctive historical traditions to societies often seen as numbingly conformist and homogeneous."

And yet to thus transpose diversity into the merely culinary only further bastardizes the practice of democracy itself by casting the relationships among people as the negotiation of individual tastes and the avoidance of puerile conflicts, rather than as a shared pursuit of the good.

This leads to the second feature of the exercise of liberal democracy, which is the propensity on the part of the United States and its European allies to choose the relative certainty of pandering tyrants and military dictatorships over the chaos of emergent democratic movements.

Behind the wariness lurks the spectre of "illiberal democracy," or elected governments that reflect popular support for forms of radical Islam and exhibit anti-American sentiment. The presumption here being that democracy qua democracy can neither be anti-Western nor alloyed with forms of devout yet egalitarian Islam.

It is striking that both Hosni Mubarak and Tony Blair - not to mention a good number of western analysts and even Glenn Beck - have invoked the Hobbesian realities of the Middle-Eastern politics: without the presence of an unassailable authority, "a common Power to keep them all in awe," as Thomas Hobbes famously put it, these societies would descend into that "condition which is called warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man."

Admittedly, Saddam Hussein was just such a "Power." But if anything, the removal of Saddam is the foreign policy exception that proves the rule. His long and brutal rule over Iraq imposed a kind of bloody peace over a nation which had been wracked for decades by anarchy and fratricidal violence. Such was King Faisal's chilling assessment of his own people in 1933, shortly before his own deposition. Iraqis are, he said,

"unimaginable masses of human beings devoid of any patriotic ideas, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever."

The culpably naive assumption upon which America's deposition of Saddam was based was that, once released from tyranny, Iraqis would spontaneously adopt a recognisably democratic - indeed, well-nigh Western - form of society.

The reality of the situation, however, was that removing Saddam opened the gates of hell as the nation regressed to that more primal state of internecine conflict. As George Packer wrote in The Assassins' Gate, "Iraq without the lid of totalitarianism clamped down has become a place of roiling and contending ethnic claims."

While the political lesson of Iraq - as well as the fraught experience of elections in Iran, Jordan, Algeria and Palestine - should neither be dismissed nor ignored, and the creeping influence of the Muslim Brotherhood should be guarded against with utmost vigilance, is it not apparent that something of an entirely different order is now taking place in Egypt?

Unlike Iraq, and despite the best efforts of Hosni Mubarak to eliminate any semblance of political opposition in Egypt, what has emerged in and through the mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square is, I'm tempted to say, civil society as such.

For decades, the seeds of some future, just, egalitarian society were borne by the indomitable cadre of activists, politicians, human-rights lawyers and public intellectuals who were censured, jailed and tortured under Mubarak - one thinks of Mohamad El Baradei, Ayman Nour and Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

But now, through the practices of prayer, mutual regard, communal celebration, patriotism and non-violence, the Egyptian people have opened up an entirely new political space that, for the time being, eludes the looming realities of economic stagnation and the persistence of military dictatorship, neither of which will be solved by Mubarak's departure.

Indeed, Mubarak's inevitable departure is certain to represent little more than a cosmetic change to Egypt's barren political landscape. Remember that Egypt has been a military dictatorship since 1952, and that the military will be just as expedient in removing Mubarak from power to ensure the status quo as it was in installing this 'hero' of the Yom Kippur War of 1973 as Anwar al-Sadat's vice-president in the first place.

Nonetheless, the crowd's unyielding demand, "Irhal! Irhal!" - "Leave! Leave!" - is neither fanciful nor naive. Instead, it is precisely this symbolic demand that is keeping the possibilities for Egypt political future uncircumscribed by the immoral realpolitik to which they have heretofore been subjected.

And at this point, Slavoj Zizek is absolutely correct: now is not the time for cynicism, appeasement, or for ensuring that one is on "the right side of history" (as Richard Coen has despicably written in the Washington Post). Rather, the sheer authenticity of the popular movement in Egypt demands of the West nothing less than hopeful solidarity - that is, unless the cardinal virtues of Western democracy really have vanished altogether from our political imaginations.

Most university leaders lack the language and moral imagination to confront evils such as white supremacy. They lack those things not because of who they are, but because of what the modern research university has become. Such an acknowledgment is also part of the moral clarity that we can offer to ourselves and to our students. We have goods to offer, but they are not ultimate goods. And so universities need to look outside themselves and partner with other moral traditions and civic communities.

I am not in the habit of praising Trump. The transcript reveals his usual crassness and prejudice ... Every one of the refugees, in Trump's tiny universe, is a would-be Boston bomber. But the president also probes the unsustainable contradictions of Australian policy. He asks why all these migrants are confined if they are, as Turnbull insists, not bad people.

Facebook will decide that its users prefer video to words, or ideologically pleasing propaganda to more-objective accounts of events - and so it will de-emphasize the written word or hard news in its users' feeds. When it makes shifts like this, or when Google tweaks its algorithm, the web traffic flowing to a given media outlet may plummet, with rippling revenue ramifications. The problem isn't just financial vulnerability, however. It's also the way tech companies dictate the patterns of work; the way their influence can affect the ethos of an entire profession, lowering standards of quality and eroding ethical protections.

About the Editor

Scott Stephens

Scott Stephens is Editor of the ABC's Religion and Ethics website, and specialist commentator on religion and ethics for ABC radio and television. He is also co-host (with Waleed Aly) of The Minefield on RN. He presented two series of the critically acclaimed "Life's Big Questions" program on ABC1, and has guest presented Conversations with Richard Fidler on ABC local radio. He has published widely on moral philosophy, theology and political theory, and is currently writing a book on whether public ethics can survive in a media age.

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